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St. Thomas on the Philosophical Intelligibility and Plausibility of the Doctrine of Divine Providence: Situating Summa Contra Gentiles 3, Chap

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St. Thomas on the Philosophical Intelligibility and Plausibility of the Doctrine of Divine Providence: Situating Summa Contra Gentiles 3, Chap St. Thomas on the Philosophical Intelligibility and Plausibility of the Doctrine of Divine Providence: Situating Summa Contra Gentiles 3, chap. 64 Aquinas Philosophy Workshop, Mt. St. Mary’s College, 2014 Alfred J. Freddoso 1. Introduction: The main topics of this presentation The assigned title for my presentation is “A Philosophical Notion of Providence.” More specifically, when I asked whether there was any particular topic he wanted me to talk about, Fr. Thomas Joseph White replied, “I really would like to have someone explain why or how there is a philosophical intelligibility to the notion of providence in Aquinas — particularly, for example, in SCG 3, chap. 64, ‘That God Governs Things by His Providence’.” Now you might think that the last thing someone of my age wants or needs is an assigned topic, especially one whose import is not immediately crystal clear. But you would be wrong. Over the past fifteen years I have on several occasions greatly benefitted by, in effect, being treated like an undergraduate and required to write on a mandated topic. For me it always provides a good opportunity to integrate the fundamental starting points that I now take for granted with new material or, as in the present case, with old material looked at from a fresh perspective. Now I could have asked Fr. Thomas Joseph exactly what he meant, but what fun would that be? Like your typical undergraduate, I decided to think it out for myself without going through the bother of asking the professor. So as I have come to understand it on my own, as it were, my appointed task is (a) to situate the doctrine of divine providence within the broader context of St. Thomas’s natural theology and (b) in this way to exhibit both its intelligibility and its plausibility on the basis of first principles drawn from natural reason. My goal is to present the big picture and to do it in such a way as to suggest lines of further inquiry. With this in mind, I’m going to do three things in this presentation. First, I am going to rehearse what is, upon reflection, the rather astonishing content of the Catholic Christian doctrine of divine providence as understood both by St. Thomas and by the Church herself in solemn pronouncements. Next, in the central part of my presentation, I will situate this content within St. Thomas’s natural theology, i.e., within the project of SCG 1-3. Lastly, I will take a brief look at SCG 3, chap. 64, commenting on its structure and on some of its ten arguments. 2. The doctrine of providence as the Church and St. Thomas understand it So let’s first look at the content of the doctrine of divine providence. As St. Thomas explains in ST 1, q. 22, a. 3, God’s providence in the broad sense includes both “a plan for ordering the things provided for toward their end (ratio ordinis rerum provisarum in finem); and the execution of this ordering, which is called governance (gubernatio).” According to St. Thomas — and according to the Church — God, the divine artisan or craftsman, freely and knowingly plans, orders, and provides for all the effects, without exception, that constitute His artifact, the created universe with its entire causal history, and He executes His freely chosen plan by playing an active causal role sufficient to ensure its exact realization. Thus, whatever occurs is properly said to be specifically decreed by God. More exactly, each effect produced in the created universe is 2 either specifically and knowingly intended by Him (providentia approbationis) or, in concession to the defectiveness of creatures, specifically and knowingly permitted by Him (providentia concessionis). In SCG 3, chaps. 71-76 (as well as in ST 1, q. 22, a. 2) St. Thomas responds, one by one, to the reasons philosophers have cited to exclude one or another of the following classes of things or actions or effects in the created world from the scope of God’s providence: (a) effects that are fortuitous relative to the causal tendencies of their created (or secondary) causes; (b) anything involving a defect of any sort; (c) actions or effects that occur by natural necessity; (d) actions or effects that result from the power of free choice; and (e) individual corruptible things (as opposed to their species). In other places St. Thomas likewise defends the claim, once again explicitly taught by the Church, that God has comprehensive and absolutely certain knowledge of the future, including the contingent future. Despite the fact that this conception of divine providence is clearly found in St. Thomas, is firmly established in magisterial teaching (de fide according to Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (1960)), pp. 89-91), and does not seem to have been disputed by either Lutherans or Calvinists in the 16th century, it is rejected by many contemporary Evangelical philosophers of religion and even by some prominent Catholics, including Peter Geach and (as I read him) Jacques Maritain. (In the early 1990’s I myself was scolded in a book review by a Jesuit for invoking this account of providence; he called it a Stoic, rather than Christian, conception of divine providence!) Many of these thinkers are motivated by the conviction that the Catholic conception of divine providence (or ‘meticulous providence’, as it has been derisively labeled in the literature) is incompatible with the exercise of human (and, presumably, angelic) free choice. Beyond this, some of them — e.g., those who espouse the so-called ‘open-ness’ of God and so-called ‘theistic personalists’ — harbor a more general antipathy to any account of God’s providence that in effect attributes to God a greater power and knowledge than St. Thomas himself is willing to attribute to the angelic nature. I suppose that these thinkers are not so much anthropomorphites, to use Hume’s charming nomenclature, as they are ‘angelomorphites’. This point is worth dwelling on for a few moments because it tells us something important about St. Thomas’s conception of natural theology done aright — viz., that it yields a God who really is utterly weird and unlike anything we can imagine — or, to put it in more traditional terms, a God who really is transcendent and such that when we talk about Him, we barely understand what we are saying. For, to be fair to the angelomorphites, what is attributed to God by the doctrine of divine providence is indeed truly astounding and literally mind-boggling. It’s not just that God has comprehensive and absolutely certain knowledge of the natures and activities of created corporeal beings without being causally acted upon by any of those beings; for, according to St. Thomas (and St. Augustine), angels — who, though very impressive, are still limited or finite beings — have this sort of knowledge by means of the intelligible species that they are naturally endowed with. Again, it’s not just that God has cognition of future contingents of the sort that the ‘open-ness’ crowd assigns to Him, i.e., cognition of all the causal tendencies and inclinations of created beings along with knowledge of their locations and histories; for, according to St. Thomas, angels have as much of this sort of cognition of future contingents as can be had. Again, it’s not just that for any place in the corporeal universe, God has the power to act at that place; for this is a power that St. Thomas attributes to any ordinary angel. It’s hard for us to imagine what it’s like to be an angel, but it’s not impossible. For we can imagine having comprehensive knowledge of the corporeal world at our fingertips — via, say, a super-computer programmed with some ultimate and comprehensive scientific theory of everything and with all the empirical information we would need about the locations and conditions of individuals. And, likewise, we can imagine (sort of) what it would be like to have the ability to act anywhere in the universe. In both cases, it seems from what we know that we would be imagining something that is naturally impossible 3 for us as corporeal beings, but we can imagine ourselves free of such impediments in the way that St. Thomas takes angels to be free of them. We can even imagine what it would be like to have direct cognition of and communication with angelic beings. By contrast, God is, so to speak, the creator-genius whose knowledge is, as St. Thomas puts it, a cause of everything, including the angels and their knowledge and power. It’s not just that God is omniscient; it’s that He’s omniscient simply by knowing Himself. Neophytes sometimes joke that St. Thomas sure has a lot to say about God, considering his denial that we can know what God is. But the fact is that all his talk about God’s nature, perfections, and activity stretches our language to the breaking point. The very characterization of God as Pure Actuality with no admixture of passive potentiality and as Unparticipated Esse in possession of all perfections involves limiting notions that exhibit the strain that a godlike being puts on our conceptual resources. For instance, in the case of God’s knowledge, St. Thomas finds that the only way to even hint at the truth is to collapse four elements that are distinct from one another in the case of human and angelic intellective cognition of the corporeal world: So from everything that has been said so far, it is clear that in God the following are altogether one and the same thing: (a) the intellect, (b) that which is understood, (c) the intelligible species, and (d) the very act of understanding.
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